Sleepless
by W.H. Woolhat
Summary: An introspective Daniel finally gets up the courage to tell Charlotte how he feels.


**Author's Note:** This was supposed to be a one-shot fic, but wound up taking me somewhere around 10 days to complete. I find Dan adorably awkward, but both his character and Charlotte's are still mostly closed books to me, a fact which made them harder to write than I expected. I hope we learn more about them as time goes on!

* * *

Daniel Faraday wasn't sure he liked the island any more. True, it offered no end of unique phenomena to study, but he wasn't getting much time to do experiments. It seemed like he was always being dragged off on some trek through the jungle, or someone was threatening him, or people were following him and Charlotte around with guns.

He hated guns. They made him nervous.

Evidently, though, the people on the island who said they were from Oceanic flight 815 were nervous about other things. Daniel noticed that they never all slept at the same time, and several of them carried guns in a disconcerting way that suggested they knew there was something out there, in the jungle, that they needed to protect themselves from. Something that had been there since before the freighter showed up.

He tried not to concern himself with that. Thus far, he had spent his nights sitting up by the fire, taking what notes he could on the island and re-reading anything he thought was pertinent. His notebooks, full of his own barely-legible scrawl, made him feel safe. They were familiar, a reminder of what had interested him about the island in the first place.

Except…except that he couldn't be sure if that was true. He couldn't remember, now, why he had ended up on the freighter, what he had been thinking or how he had gotten there. He was having trouble remembering a lot of things.

His memory had been a bit shaky for years. "Unreliable" was the best word for it, which was why he wrote everything down and spent a lot of time re-reading. It was his own fault, and he had to live with it. But it still terrified him.

He could remember bits and pieces. He remembered that a lot of the other people on the freighter had made him uneasy, but most of them hadn't given him the time of day anyway. He remembered hearing the captain yell a lot, behind closed doors. He remembered being worried, although what he had been worried about was a mystery.

Now, he was worried about the island, and about getting home. Losing communication with the freighter had shaken him. He had assumed that the satellite phones would work, that someone had checked to make sure they would always work. How were he and Charlotte supposed to know what was going on if they couldn't talk to anybody?

Come to that, where _was_ everyone? Last he knew, Lapidus had flown back to the freighter, and Miles seemed to have disappeared completely…

"I can't believe these people." Charlotte's exasperated voice muttered as she appeared from the shadows beyond the fire. She settled herself across from Daniel, leaning back on one hand and resting her other arm on her knee. "I've never met anyone who's so bloody paranoid. As if it's _our_ fault we can't contact the freighter…" She trailed off, looking at him across the flames. Her eyebrows drew together in something like surprise. "Dan, why are you crying?"

"What?" Daniel put a hand to his face and realized that his cheeks were wet. When had that happened? "Oh. I don't know."

"You said that yesterday," Charlotte reminded him.

"Did I?"

"Yeah, you did."

He didn't remember crying the day before. He seemed to be doing that a lot lately, too; sitting and thinking, then realizing that tears were blurring his vision. Something about Oceanic 815 had made him upset since he first saw the footage of the sunken plane on television. Being on the island magnified that feeling somehow, even though he didn't exactly know what the feeling was.

Maybe he was just plain scared. That would make sense. The freighter hadn't felt safe, and the island didn't, either…

Charlotte was still looking at him. She made him nervous, too, but in a different way. He didn't always know how to act around her. She was so sure of herself, and always seemed to know exactly what she was doing. Nobody had bothered her on the freighter, and, if they had, Daniel felt sure that she would have stood up for herself without batting an eye.

That attitude made her hard to talk to, sometimes. She had a short temper, which meant she got annoyed easily, and she had found plenty of things on the island to be annoyed about. She didn't like being stuck waiting for word from Lapidus or the freighter, she didn't like being grilled about their mission, and she especially didn't like the survivors of 815. She thought they were too suspicious and petty, and she grumbled about them at length when she was sure they were out of earshot.

Daniel didn't know what to say to any of this. The survivors _were_ paranoid, but who knew what the island had been doing to them? Who knew what effects it might have on a person over time?

_He_ wantedto know. He wanted to be able to research and experiment, to go home with a notebook full of fascinating new things to test, but thus far all he had were the results of his one experiment with time dilation. He had yet to put them to any sort of good use, or even try to find out what they meant.

In short, he felt useless. Useless and scared.

"Dan?" Charlotte was sitting next to him now, looking as close to concerned as she ever got. "Do you want to do the cards again?"

He shook his head. "No. No, I'm sick of memory games."

"It'll help you concentrate," she pointed out.

"I think I'll just get some sleep."

"Dan, are you all right?"

He paused in getting to his feet and looked back at her, meeting her pale gaze in surprise. She had never asked if he was all right before.

"Yeah, I'm—I'm all right."

Charlotte shook her head. "You're a terrible liar."

"What?"

"Look, I don't like this place much, either, but you've got to stop getting so upset about it." Her expression was severe and businesslike. "These people are already suspicious of us. The last thing we need is you making us look vulnerable."

"You're not helping much, snapping at them all the time," Daniel pointed out. He didn't know why he was arguing, except maybe because, after having unwarranted anger directed at him by the 815 survivors, he didn't want to take any more.

"I'm just supposed to let them blame us for things we don't have anything to do with?" Charlotte demanded.

Daniel looked away and picked up a handful of sand, watching as it sifted through his fingers. "Charlotte, what are we doing here?"

She seemed surprised by the sudden change of subject. "We have a job to do."

"No, I know that, but it doesn't make any _sense_." The last grain of sand dropped to the ground. "These people are _stuck_ here. Why aren't we helping them?"

"Is _that_ what's bothering you?" Charlotte exclaimed. "These people have been nothing but hostile."

"I know that, too, but…but this place isn't safe. It's fascinating, but it's not safe."

"Not with these loonies on it," Charlotte muttered.

"I mean _inherently_ not safe," Daniel insisted. "There are things going on here, phenomena that don't occur anywhere else on the planet. It's impossible to know the extent of the effects they have on people. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe there's something I'm missing. But I don't think so." He needed a notebook for conversations like this. Everything always seemed clearer when he could write it down.

Charlotte looked at him for what seemed like a long time, searching his face with eyes like two pinpoints of ice. At last, her expression softened.

"This is really worrying you, isn't it?" she said. When Daniel nodded, she sighed. "It's not our problem."

"But it _is_ a problem."

"You're makingit _your_ problem," Charlotte pointed out. "We're not going to be here forever, Dan. Nobody's going to let you loose in the jungle with a little scientific toolbox and let you have a go at whatever strikes your fancy." He opened his mouth to say something, but she went on. "_And_, even if you _did_ have time for that, how would you fix any problems you found?"

Daniel shut his mouth. He didn't have an answer to that. He rarely thought further than his current hypothesis. Only when an experiment didn't work out the way he expected it to did he re-evaluate things and try again. On a good day, anyway. On bad days, his thoughts had a tendency to get away from him, and he spent most of his time trying to sort out the resulting mental tangle.

He picked at the sand, pushing the grains around with his fingernails. "I just want to…I don't know. _Do_ something, I guess."

"Well, that's admirable, Dan," Charlotte replied slowly, although it didn't sound like she thought it was. "But it's not practical. We have to focus on what we came here to do. Going off on tangents isn't going to make things any better for us."

"I know."

"I told you on the boat, you have to stop worrying so much."

There was silence as Daniel continued to examine the sand by his feet. Vague patterns presented themselves as the grains were lit by the flickering flames of the fire, and were lost in shadow just as quickly.

It seemed like the conversation was over. Charlotte moved to get up.

"I like you, Charlotte." The statement was so sudden, and sounded so strange coming from Daniel, that she stopped, sitting down again.

"What?"

"I like you," he repeated. "I mean, I don't feel…I don't have to be scared, when you're here. I—" He broke off and looked away, seeming embarrassed.

Charlotte just looked at him for a minute, not sure of how to react. Of course, she had _suspected_, but she hadn't thought he'd actually _say_ anything. She cleared her throat.

"Well, Dan, er, that's—"

He cut her off, still not looking at her. "No, forget it. It was a silly thing to say…"

"No, it wasn't." Her tone was so firm that surprise overrode Daniel's embarrassment and he turned, searching her expression. For the first time since he had met her, Charlotte looked unsure of herself.

"What?"

"I'm actually glad you said something," she went on slowly. "But Dan, it's—I'm not—" She cursed herself inwardly. It shouldn't be so hard to sort out what she wanted to say. She took a breath and let it out again, turning her gaze back to the fire.

"I'm not really the sort of person people _like_," she managed at last.

Now Daniel looked truly confused. "What are you talking about?"

"I'm not exactly warm and fuzzy, Dan," Charlotte replied, unable to keep the exasperation out of her voice. "I'm short-tempered. I'm mean. You even said yourself that I have a bad attitude."

Daniel thought about this.

"Does that mean you don't _want _me to like you?" he asked at length.

"No!" Charlotte exclaimed, a little too hastily. "I mean…no. It's just…I'm not very romantic, Dan. You know? I'm not the hand-holding and cuddling type."

"I know."

She gave him a long, searching look. "And you don't care."

Daniel shrugged. "Do you care that I can barely remember my own name half the time?"

She couldn't help smiling a bit at this. He did have a point.

"You try," she said.

He smiled, too; a sad, crooked smile. "I have to."

"I'll keep helping you."

"Thanks, Charlotte."

They lapsed into silence, both staring into the fire with distant expressions. At length, Charlotte got to her feet.

"Get some sleep, Dan," she said, touching his shoulder briefly before disappearing into the darkness beyond the flames.

Daniel smiled to himself once she was gone. He'd told her he liked her, and she was okay with it. She didn't mind. Maybe being on the island wouldn't be so hard now.

After a while, Daniel got up, and he, too, went to bed.


End file.
